Thread: FCC releases Internet speed test tool UPDATED PLAN

FCC unveiling sweeping broadband plan

Posted 1h 8m ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — Communications regulators are unveiling a sweeping proposal to overhaul U.S. broadband policy. Their aim: to bring affordable, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans and make access much faster for people who already have broadband.

Yet it's not certain the Federal Communications Commission can find the funding, corporate support and legal clearance to carry out the entire vision of the plan.

Already, broadcasters oppose one key element of the proposal, which calls for reclaiming some airwaves now in the hands of TV stations and instead selling those frequencies to companies that deliver wireless Internet access. And the FCC hopes to modernize the federal program that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural areas — something that Congress and federal regulators have been trying to do for years.

The FCC plan, mandated by last year's stimulus bill and being delivered to Congress on Tuesday, lays out an ambitious vision for wiring the entire country with broadband. It reflects the Obama administration's position that high-speed Internet access is no longer just a luxury but is critical for economic development, education and health care.

"To me, broadband is an infrastructure challenge that's very akin to what we've faced in the past with telephones and electricity," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in an interview with The Associated Press. Genachowski has made the national broadband plan his top priority, and his legacy at the commission will be linked closely to the plan's success or failure.

The proposal sets a goal of connecting 100 million U.S. households to broadband connections of 100 megabits per second — at least 20 times faster than most home connections now — by 2020.

The plan also calls for every American community to have at least one anchor institution, such as a school, library or hospital, that has ultra-high-speed Internet access — at least a gigabit per second, or 10 times faster than the 100 megabits per second envisioned for home connections.

In addition, the plan is designed to encourage more people to subscribe to broadband. About two-thirds of U.S. households have high-speed Internet access now. Many people in the other one-third could get broadband but choose not to buy it, either because they think it's too expensive or because they don't see a need for it. The FCC plan calls for increasing adoption rates to more than 90% of the population.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010- ... -FCC_N.htm

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The Plan sent to congress can be downloaded at this link:

http://www.broadband.gov/download-plan/

You can see the internet speed test in this site
http://www.ip-details.com/internet-speed-test/

I looked up Ookla, it is a startup from the founder of Speakeasy.

Then I looked up Mlab. Mlab is run by the New American Foundation. Here is what I found out about the New American Foundation.

http://www.measurementlab.net/
At the BOTTOM of the Mlab site in very small letters.
Privacy Policy & Acceptable Use Policy

All original material on Measurement Lab by New America Foundation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. 'User' and 'Researcher' front page and sidebar icons licensed under LGPL, sourced from Oxygen Refit 2-Orange icon set.

M-Lab is a collaborative effort led by researchers in partnership with companies and other institutions.

Google, others launch M-Lab to track network openness
By Nate Anderson | Last updated January 28, 2009 2:31 PM

"Measure twice, cut once," says the old carpenter's adage, and what's good for framing a house turns out to be important for tech policy as well. Without better knowledge of what's actually happening on the collection of networks we call the Internet, researchers and policy makers are operating from a position of ignorance. But getting that sort of network data has, to date, been tough to do.

Google's Vint Cerf, one of the men behind TCP/IP, hopes to make it easier. Cerf Wednesday will announce at a Washington, DC event a new project launched by Google, the New America Foundation (which Google supports), and PlanetLab (which Google also helps support) designed to make distributed network management easy to do, and the data from such projects easy to share. Ars spoke with Google and the New America Foundation about the effort.



The rest of the story at:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... enness.ars

Mr Soros on Leadership counsel of of New America Foundation. We know who he is realated to.

Jonathan Soros
From SourceWatch
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Jonathan Soros "is President and Co-Deputy Chairman of Soros Fund Management, LLC. He joined the firm in 2002 and, in addition to management responsibilities, has focused on the private equity portfolios managed by the firm. Prior to joining SFM, Mr. Soros clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and co-founded Fair Trial Initiative (FTI), a North Carolina-based non-profit organization that seeks to improve the quality of representation available to death penalty defendants.

"Mr. Soros is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Wesleyan University." [1]

Leadership Council, New America FoundationTrustee, Central European University [1]
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jonathan_Soros

Then over at Soros.org, I searched for grants to the New America Foundation

[quote]http://www.soros.org/search/results?...15&submit.y=12

1-15 of [b175 [/blistings 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Next Page

New America Foundation
A grant to support the New America Foundation's Next Social Contract initiative, a domestic policy effort to develop a new metanarrative to assess how the American social contract evolved, why it fails to meet needs today, and how it can be reinvented for the conditions of a largely post-industrial and increasingly diverse society.
Type: Grantee

New America Foundation
A grant of $300,000 over 18 months to support the project, Leaving the Dark Side: Shaping a New U.S. Counterterrorism Narrative.
Type: Grantee

Magnum Cultural Foundation
The Magnum Cultural Foundation privides scholarships to attend a certificate course in human rights photography, offered jointly by New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Magnum Cultural Foundation.
Type: Grantee

Lost Liberties: America in the Age of Ashcroft
A panel of experts discussed and celebrated the publication of two new books that provide the first comprehensive overview of civil liberties in post–September 11 America.
Type: Event

Twenty-First Century Foundation
A grant to support the work of the foundation's Black Men and Boys Initiative.
Type: Grantee

OSI Grantee Honored for New Media Excellence
VerdadAbierta.com, which examines the paramilitary side of Colombia’s long civil war, was awarded the “New Mediaâ€